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Then Jayce came down the stairs, and I’d hesitated. I let Nick slap me because I’d hesitated when I heard his footsteps, and I could still taste the sting of the cut in my mouth.
But…
“So, you’re… actually Marcus Holden’s kid?” I asked the question in a soft voice, trying to hedge on whether fear or awe would work better with the man beside me. I even wrapped my arms around my chest, pretending to shrink in on myself.
He just flicked on the heater and ignored the fact that he didn’t have a shirt on.
I had an endless amount of tattoos to memorize during our drive, and a wall of silence when it came to the question I’d asked. I decided to try a different angle. “Where are we going?”
He hesitated, but this time he answered. “I can take you to your apartment so you can grab a few things, or we can head straight to my place.” Jayce didn’t look at me when he said it — he kept his eyes focused on the road in front of him, but I noticed his knuckles whiten on the steering wheel.
He was worried.
“Your place?” That was the normal reaction, right? “What do you mean, your place?” I had an inkling about exactly what he meant, but I didn’t want to let on that I was deeply aware of what the Holden name stood for.
“Look,” he glanced at me through dark lashes, but quickly flicked his eyes back to the road. “Whether you intended to or not, you went into that garage to be bought and sold. I just… I made sure you were bought by someone who wasn’t going to introduce you to the lifestyle in the form of gang rape.”
His knuckles twitched again, hard enough I noticed the muscles in his arms flex. I didn’t mistake the tic in his jaw, and I wondered if it was from distaste over the entire situation, or if it had something to do with the company sitting in the car with him. I was curious to push the issue, but I also needed to make sure I was playing the situation smart.
Logically speaking, I could admit finding myself under Jayce’s care was infinitely better than being in the basement with Nick and his men — he was right about the way they’d intended to introduce me to their world. They made as much clear before Jayce stepped into the room.
He was also the son of my target. Even if I couldn’t find Marcus right away, there was a plethora of information I could gain about him, his associates, and if there were other branches or partners of his ring — Jayce was an oasis in the desert when it came to the intel I’d been sorely lacking. I wasn’t used to having trouble finding what I was looking for, but I’d barely been able to scrape together enough about Marcus Holden to get as far as I had, even with government resources.
And in the end, I would have just gotten my hands dirty with men who had no useful information.
I let out a small, shaking breath and kept my arms tucked around my waist when I spoke. I was good at playing overwhelmed. “It’s fine. We can just go to your place.”
My apartment was normal enough on the surface, but if he decided to prod around, he might find my laptop, my weaponry, the files I kept carefully hidden on all the information I’d gathered. I didn’t trust digital copies not to be scrubbed, so I kept hardcopies, too. You never knew who was lurking around, waiting to stab you in the back.
“You don’t want your clothes? Anything?” I didn’t know if he sounded suspicious or pitying. I needed him to lean toward the latter.
“If I go back there and Keyton thinks I backed out on paying off his debt, he’ll put a bullet in my head without stopping to ask.” My fingers raked through my curls, and I looked out the window. “I didn’t back out of paying, did I? He’ll hunt us down if I did.”
I needed to know if he was just… kidnapping me, or if he intended to actually pay for me. I had to know how official this was.
“How much does he owe?”
Fuck, how much had I said?
“A quarter million.” My mind mentally flipped through the file I’d put together. My boss was especially happy he'd gotten an extra pay bump from me borrowing the money — of course, Connor was so high up in the government he didn't actually need the cash. Keyton had been a real enough man to begin with — a retired lawyer with a gambling problem. Killing him and assuming his identity when he’d already established bad habits and an in with the Holden family made sense. Connor took the money and cleaned up my mess, and no one was the wiser.
“Oh.” Jayce pulled out his phone and swiped his thumb across the screen without taking his eyes off the road. He brought the device to his ear, and I heard the muffled sound of someone answering. “Transfer, please.” There was a pause, and then he spouted off a string of numbers I mentally jotted down. I doubted it was anything more than a temporary passcode — it was probably set up to change after every use.
“Three hundred thousand.”
The amount he said caught me off guard, but I didn’t interrupt him. “Two hundred and fifty thousand into the main Holden account, and transfer the other fifty to my personal banking.”
There was another pause, and he raised his phone and ran the scanner on the back along his collarbone — I had to assume he had a verification chip there just beneath the skin. Jayce glanced at the screen one more time, then hung up.
“What did you just do?”
He was focusing on the road again, and he didn’t look at me when he answered.
“Paid for you.”
I probably should have been offended.
Jayce Holden had never been on my radar, so I’d never been to the house at the end of his very long driveway. I’d scouted around multiple locations, as well as the suspected Holden estate. As far as I knew, it was just a decoy. I’d never seen anyone come in or go out of it, unless they had a private access road I didn’t know about.
